Genealogy Books - The Seven Daughters of Eve

Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: Book is full of unnecessary bits and dumb bits
Comment: 1)The bit about his love of hamsters as a kid was both unnecessary and dumb2)The fictional stories
bit (last half of the book) was both dumb and unnecessary but mostly just dumb3) The bit on
Anastasia was unnecessary4) The bit on the neanderthals was unnecessary (it's been pointed out, we
already knew they weren't in our background, at least not much)5)The gripes with the other
scientists was unnecessary6)The Polynesian DNA bit was unnecessary (and totally out of place)I could
go on but I've made my point. Book is a total bummer.

Customer Rating:

Summary: How DNA tells a story
Comment: The Seven daughters of Eve is an unusual and interesting study of modern day Europeans and their
ancient mothers. But author and scientist Brian Sykes also gives us a capsule of his career as a
researcher that led him to this ultimate discovery.

An early Sykes story has him
passing through the Polynesian islands on sabbatical and collecting several samples DNA. He was
interested in whether the islanders were descendants of Asians as commonly believed by scientists or
South Americans which was Thor Heyerdahl's conclusion in the famous book Kon-Tiki. With enough
samples of DNA, Sykes was able to solve the puzzle.

Along the way, the author used
DNA to solve the mystery of Czar Nicholas and his family and whether the lady who said she was
Anastasia was genuine.

After such experiences, Sykes was well equipped to handle the
DNA of the ancient Ice Man found in the early 1990s. That strand of DNA led to this book about our
ancient mothers.

I'm not a frequent reader of science, but Sykes' book is also a
mystery and the two complement each other well.

The part I liked the least was Sykes
fictional biographies of the seven women he identified. The sketches were interesting, but they
seemed kind of corny on the heels of the hard science delivered up front. But maybe that part was
essential for us to get an idea of their lives, and I liked the book a great deal anyway. />
There's something exciting about the fact that our DNA can be used to trace back our
ancestors and this book opened up my eyes to the possibilities.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Sykes is way more conceited than the average scientist
Comment: Ten times over. Spencer Wells is a scientist of great accomplishment and he didn't talk half as much
about himself in Journey of Man as Sykes did in Seven Daughters of Eve. As for the stone age
historical fiction in SDOE. Dummy city.

Customer Rating:

Summary: thought provoking and interresting
Comment: I just finished reading the book, and while it's not the very best book i have read in the science
genre, it's alot better then alot of these reviewers would have you believe. Sykes is no more
egotistical than any other science writer or englishman, and he admits that his bias is toward the
people and places he knows-- england and the people in it, and europe by extension. That out of the
way, the story he tells is the history of the information he found out-- his personal experiences
are the ones that led to the creation of the methods he used, and those of the people he knew and
worked with or competed with created the challenges his team had to overcome. Science is just as
competitive as anyone else or anything else, and without those stories, he would have neglected any
of the arguements that could be brought against him from the scientific community (arguements he
solved and survived, by the way).

Many people seem to have trouble with the idea that a
woman's genetics can tell a story about ancestry. Really, in this day and age, is that such a
surprise? Men aren't the only ones who have genes and arguing against women is just plain silly when
Sykes has already proven the value.

Many other people seem to have trouble with the
idea that we all trace our ancestry back through the middle east and into Africa. This has also
already been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Maybe it's the fact that Sykes chose to reference
Eve in the book and the title-- a Biblical reference would probably attract the sort of
fundamentalist readers who might be resitent to what science says. Any other objections are just
racist and really have no basis if you read the scientific literature.

The stone-age
fiction did occasionally get silly, but if you think about it, he was trying to cram an entire
experience into the life of one person; try doing the same with your own life and see if it doesn't
get unrealistic sometimes. And the facts were right, so i have no real complaint about that. I
understand that he was trying to show us how people lived in the timeframes he had discussed, and so
i can see past the sillier bits and into the facts.

This book is really very
informative and interresting. It makes me see things in a different way, and wonder which of the
clans I belong to-- it makes me wonder how I'm connected to the rest of the world, and really I
don't think that's such a terrible thing to think. If this is a challenging idea to people, maybe
they need to be challenged more often.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Absolutely painful to read is this book!
Comment: Either this stuck up English twit Sykes is writing all about himself or he's writing stupid, phony
stone age stories. If I want dumb stone age fiction I'll watch The Flintstones.

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